Solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI) largely affect the safety, cycle life, and rate capability of the Li (ion) batteries. Improving the mechanical properties, e.g. Young's modulus, of SEI helps to withstand the damages caused by volume changes of the electrode material resulted from lithium-ion intercalation/deintercalation. Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) nanoindentation affords as an effective way to obtain both the morphology and Young's modulus of a specified area of a sample. However, in order to calculate the precise Young's modulus with statistical significance, a mass of forces curves from various areas of the samples are usually needed, which makes this method laborious. Recently, the newly-developed Amplitude Modulation-Frequency Modulation mode (AM-FM mode) of AFM has been reported as an efficient approach to measure the Young's modulus of materials, which provides both the morphology graph and Young's modulus map at the same time in several minutes. Since the development of AM-FM mode is still in its early stage, herein we studied the feasibility of applicating this technique in the SEI research. First, we demonstrated AM-FM can be applied on rapidly distinguishing materials with different Young's modulus on one sample. Then we found that the tip radius parameter in this mode has a huge impact on the Young's modulus value. We evaluated the accuracy of AM-FM as a quantitative method to quickly characterize Young's modulus of a studied sample by using standard materials with known Young's modulus. It turned out that the Young's modulus of studied samples obtained by AM-FM still needed to be further improved. To conclude, in this work we demonstrated that AM-FM method is a novel technique for quickly distinguishing different materials on one sample, after further improvement it could probably be used for quickly measuring the Young's modulus of SEI.
Keywords：lithium battery
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SEI
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Young's modulus
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AFM
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AM-FM
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force curve
CHEN Bowen. Application of a novel method for characterization of local Young’s modulus in lithium （ion） batteries[J]. Energy Storage Science and Technology, 2022, 11(3): 991-999
Fig. 2
Measurement of a material through three channels of AFM AM-FM mode. Left side of material UV light active binder, while right side is glass; (a) morphology; (b) phase; (c) Young’s modulus (E) map (tip radius is set to 2.0 nm)
Fig. 3
(a) morphology and (b) Young’s modulus of the same surface area of a lithium anode by AM-FM mode (tip radius is set at 8 nm); (c) relationship between Young’s modulus obtained by AM-FM mode with tip radius
Fig. 6
Histograms of Young’s modulus of PS and PAN via force curve method: (a)-(c) are from three different areas in PS sample, while (d)-(f) are in PAN sample
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